PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011 PHOTO CAPTION February 1994 Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (1993e) made a close approach to Jupiter in the summer of 1992 and was broken into multiple pieces as a result of tidal forces from that giant planet. These remaining pieces will plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere at high speed (60 km/sec) during a 5.6-day period centered on July 19 1994, possibly producing spectacular results depending on the sizes of the impacting nuclei. The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera first observed the comet on July 1, 1993, and the data indicated that the 11 largest nuclei probably have diameters in the range of 2 to 4 kilometers. The new images, taken with the Hubble telescope's new Wide Field and Planetary Camera-II instrument on January 24-27, 1994, have given us an even clearer view of this fascinating object, which should allow a refinement of the size estimates. In addition, the new images show strong evidence for continuing fragmentation of some of the remaining nuclei, which will be monitored by the Hubble telescope over the next several months. The upper part of the screen shows a mosaic containing two new Wide- Field Camera (WFC) images and one Planetary Camera (PC) image (resampled to the same resolution as the WFC images) of the comet. Twenty nuclei are visible here, while one more is slightly outside of the field-of- view (to the right). Each nucleus has its own coma and tail. The fourth nucleus from the left (the first bright one) is apparently starting to separate into at least two pieces. Notice that some of the nuclei are now significantly displaced from the "train," which is defined by the imaginary line connecting most of the bright nuclei. Also notice that most of the dust (fine particles) in the system lies below the train as a result of solar radiation pressure pushing the dust in this direction. The width and height of this image project to distances of 605,000 kilometers (376,000 miles) and 126,500 kilometers (78,600 miles), respectively, at the comet. The lower left and right parts of the screen show the region near the brightest nucleus at higher resolution in images taken with the Planetary Camera (PC). To the left is the new image from the corrected PC, while the image to the right shows old data from the aberrated PC. Although careful analysis of the old data indicated that this region contained four nuclei, the new data show this much more clearly. Also, the relative separations and orientations of these nuclei have changed dramatically during the time period between the old and new images. These changes should provide further insight into the mechanism producing the fragmentation. The widths and heights of each of these PC images project to distances of approximately 61,100 kilometers (38,000 miles) and 48,300 kilometers (30,000 miles), respectively, at the comet.